Comedian George Carlin dies
Comedian George Carlin dies
Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture legend best known for his routines about drugs, dirty words and the demise of humanity, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday. He was 71.
Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham.
Carlin's jokes constantly pushed accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" — all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day. A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
He is known to a whole new generation as the voice of a hippie Volkswagen bus named Fillmore in the Pixar cartoon "Cars."
Carlin served as host of the first epidsode of "Saturday Night Live" in 1975 and appeared some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies. Carlin hosted the first broadcast of "Saturday Night Live" and noted on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long."
He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. Carlin was scheduled to receive the John F. Kennedy Center's prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in November.
